Neighbour

He came onto the veranda while I was sleeping. The dog started up a racket when she saw his face looking through the window. A kindly face, blue eyes, crowded with whiskers. He yelled, “Gidday! Having a nap are ya?”

Bloody hell, and now I had to get out of bed, put some pants on and be sociable. It was midday, after all.

He introduced himself. His surname. Ahh. He’s from one of the old families in the area. Highways and lakes and gravel tracks are named after his folk. East, my more familiar country, is mostly named after his family’s cousins. It is a name borne of the Scots; of meadows and meres and of the men who husbanded them. Then they trod sea paths to the antipodes where they took a good chunk of the south west real quick.

I did feel a bit like a blackfella checking out some neighbour’s skin. I should have asked him his original clan. From a Scot who is rapidly running out of male heirs, and relying on mother maiden names to keep up our lineage, I’m interested in how this family can keep their name in this region for so long. How did they do that? Possibly by being matrilineal Scots. There must have been a few women who’ve passed on their surname to their oldest son as his middle name on birth certificates and gotten away with it.

Sorry, I digress. It’s fun but let’s pursue that one later.

I put my pants on, opened the door and made him a cup of coffee. He didn’t quite have the profile of the noble colonial but his grandparents built the hut he was staying in, he explained. “The one on the corner, with the big table.”

It’s a really big table, he said, because pricks steal everything around here that isn’t nailed down.

Someone stole his last table. It was where he liked to sit outside and think. He came back one day and it was gone. So he built a really big table, with tree stumps for legs and a clean slice of marri as the table top and big mother fuckers of bolts to hold it all together.

He complained about the commercial fishers taking all the fish and my thoughts were akin to Old Salt’s. Well, you obviously don’t know how to catch fish then. He shook my hand after he’d shaken out his cup and said, it’s really nice to meet you. 

That night we both set nets. He was back in the morning.

He walks with his thumbs against his body.

“How many fish didja get?”

He’d caught two herring.

‘Four herring, a sea mullet and a yellow eye.’ (Fist pump) The time of day or night that I finally pulled up my net has nothing to do with anything.

He asked if he could borrow my book. I was a bit twitchy about this transaction as I handed it over because it is my own copy, with signatures of the people mentioned in the book scrawled all over the back page. It’s quite a precious copy of Salt Story but I thought, with a name like his, I could find him anywhere.